How are your New Year’s Resolutions going so far?

Have you made any? Have you kept them up? Have they already proven too hard?

Every year, I find myself fascinated by the theme, in part because New Year’s Resolutions have risen in popularity at precisely the same time other seasonal commitments have declined. Lenten fasts are out; New Year’s Resolutions are in. Catholic injunctions to fast from meat on Friday are widely derided. But Meatless Mondays? Count me in!

Perhaps the difference is between commandment and choice. (If the priest tells me to eat fish on Friday, that’s oppression; if I choose to become a pescatarian, that’s my own ethical choice.) Or perhaps it’s the difference between an arbitrary injunction and a program of self-improvement. (Giving up alcohol for Lent is puritanical; Dry January is a good idea! And, in fact, it usually is…)

But for whatever reason, while religious practices of “making resolutions” have mostly declined, the secular ones are more popular than ever. And in fact the river of cultural influence now flows in reverse. In 2023, Mark Wahlberg’s participation in the Catholic devotional app Hallow’s Pray40 Challenge led to the greatest news chyron of all time: beneath a still image of Mark Wahlberg in a slim-cut shirt with ashes on his forehead, a banner announced Lent as “Mark Wahlberg’s 40-Day Challenge.” Which… isn’t quite the traditional language for the season, but fair enough.

And yet New Year’s Resolutions seem, at least to me, to be a much harder burden to bear.

Lent lasts forty days; our Resolutions last, supposedly, all year. In Lent, you give up something good, a “guilty pleasure” at worst, in the knowledge that you’ll take it up again at Easter with joy. But New Year’s Resolutions are supposed to stick. Lent brings us closer to our mortality, to the fragility and frailty of life. New Year’s Resolutions, for the most part, are supposed to make us healthier, wealthier, and/or wiser. Lent reminds us that however we’ve succeeded or failed during those forty days, the path always leads to the Resurrection. New Year’s Resolutions lead us in a circle, month by month, as we slowly fall off the wagon and arrive back exactly where we began, in time for the next New Year.

After all: How many New Year’s Resolutions have you ever had that really lasted 365 days? (Or maybe that’s just me.)

I wonder what it would be like to take your New Year’s Resolutions and treat them as if they were a little Lent-ier. To see them, not as a chance to improve yourself—to go to the gym until you’re bored, or to dry out for a month, or to do the crossword puzzle every day—but as a chance to lighten your load, to give up some of the burden you’re carrying, and to draw a little closer to God.

You know that I love words. And I was wondering, this year, where the name of “Resolutions” comes from. Are we trying to solve some problems in our lives—perhaps to re-solve them? Are deciding we’ll be resolute in pursuing our goals? Have things gotten so bad that we need to resort to non-binding legislative acts? (“WHEREAS, I have been slacking off about the gym, and WHEREAS My loved ones gave me new exercise clothes for Christmas… RESOLVED, that I will work out four days a week in 2025.”)

The original sense of a Latin resolutionem, it turns out, is “the process of reducing things into simpler forms.” It took three centuries or so for “resolutions” to come to mean “pious intentions for the new year,” among many other things. But I think I’d like to go back.

So: If you’ve made New Year’s Resolutions this year, is there a way that they can take the pressure off you, rather than piling more and more on? Is there a way to use them to simplify your life, rather than make it harder? Is there a way that—rather than taking on Mark Wahlberg’s 365-Day Challenge—you can try, this year, to “reduce things into simpler forms?”

Many of you reading this message will be familiar with the Rev. Tom Mousin, formerly Rector of this parish and now serving as Rector of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Portland, Maine. The fact that so many of you aren’t familiar with Tom is a testament to the vibrant and growing community he fostered at St. John’s during his time here, a community that has welcomed me and many of you in the last few years.

It occurs to me this Advent that if you don’t know Tom, then you might not know about Tom’s Advent calendar. For the last 35 years, Tom and the Rev. Merry Watters, who once served as pastors of neighboring churches in Vermont, have collaborated on an Advent devotional. Each day of the calendar includes a suggested short reading from the Bible, a brief invitation or intention (“Light one candle!” “See newness,” and “Be ready” began this week), and an illustration. Each year’s calendar also includes an Advent poem.

During Tom’s time here, this calendar became—and has remained!—a part of the Advent life of many people here. This year, with so many members new to the church since Tom departed in 2019, I thought it would be worthwhile to share it again with you all, as an inspiration to take a moment each day for prayer, and a moment’s reflection, as we the day of Jesus’ birth again draws near.

You can download the calendar or subscribe to the daily devotion email, at thomasmousin.com.

There’s a tree outside my kitchen window that leans way over to one side, at something like a fifteen degree angle. Compared to this tree, the famous tower in Pisa looks like it’s standing straight. The tree stands at one side of an open field, with tall buildings on the other end but a whole neighborhood behind; the prevailing wind really only blows one way. And so over the years, the tree has grown bent, back and back and even further back. And yet it stands, bent but unbroken.

This week I learned an interesting thing: It’s no accident that the tree still stands so strong. In fact, plants need the wind to grow to their full height.

Gardeners recommend that seedlings grown inside be placed outside each day, to be exposed to the effects of the wind and direct sunlight. 17^th-century British admirals prized Welsh oak, grown in tough conditions along the Atlantic coast. Biologists have learned that plants pushed by the wind release a hormone called auxin that stimulates the growth of cells that support their stems.

I’m no biologist (that’s Michael) or a therapist (that’s Alice). I have no green thumb (that’s the Rev. Mr. Cutler). I’m not a tall-ship admiral (thanks be to God), and I didn’t even find this anecdote for myself (thanks be to Priscilla!)

But I do know a few things about human beings, in my own small way, and—whether it’s really true of trees or not—it’s certainly true for us.

Of course, there are winds that are too strong, storms that threaten to uproot us, causing traumas that require years to repair. But it’s just as much the case that the sheltered soul that never feels a breeze will fall apart at the first gust of wind. Resilience in the face of difficulty is, in large part, the result of facing hard times again and again, and slowly finding that you can survive.

This is not an original thought. Far from it. But it seemed right to me, this week. In oh so many ways, we bend in life, facing into year after year of wind. And yet those very winds are the thing that make us strong. None of us ends up perfectly perpendicular to the ground. But we keep going, nevertheless, growing toward the sun.

I’m reminded of the words of the poem “Good Timber” by Douglas Malloch (1877–1938), an American poet and—appopriately enough—Associate Editor of the trade paper American Lumberman.I’ll leave you with the first stanza…

The tree that never had to fight
     For sun and sky and air and light,
But stood out in the open plain
     And always got its share of rain,
Never became a forest king
     But lived and died a scrubby thing.

(Here’s a link to the rest.)

You may know that tomorrow is the Feast of All Saints. It’s one of the easiest dates to memorize in the church year, in large part because it falls on the day after the Eve of All Saints’, also known as All Hallows’ Eve or, in some quarters, Hallowe’en. (You all spell it with the apostrophe… right?)

Halloween, of course, is a major holiday in our secular year, but it stays true to its ecclesiastical origins. While it’s veered off a bit in recent years, Halloween still fits in recognizably with the sequence of All Saints’ on November 1 followed by All Souls’ Day on the 2nd, a day on which we commemorate all those who have died. In the church, All Saints is a major holiday too, a significant enough day that, unlike other, lesser feasts, we tend to celebrate it on the Sunday following, in addition to our celebrations during the week.

And so it is that most years, on the first Sunday in November, you’ll often find yourself standing in church, singing the beautiful hymn, “For all the saints.”

It’s a beloved hymn, and one that sums up the Episcopal or Anglican attitude to the saints fairly well, I think. Take a read through the first verse:

For all the saints, who from their labors rest,
who thee by faith before the world confessed,
thy Name, O Jesus, be forever blessed.
Alleluia, Alleluia!

There are a few things worth observing here:

It’s worth saying, first of all, that the “saints” are not just some specific set of especially-holy people. “Saints,” in this hymn or anywhere else in our church, doesn’t refer to a canonical set. We use “saints” in the Biblical sense, as when St. Paul addresses a letter “to the saints who are in Ephesus” (Eph. 1:1). The saints are all the “holy people of God,” living and dead, and that’s not only St. Paul or St. Monica or St. Martin Luther King, Jr.—that’s you, and me, and your Aunt Joan who first brought you to church when you were young.

Like any good hymn, this is a prayer. But it isn’t a prayer to the saints. It doesn’t address the saints, asking for their help or prayers. It’s always fine to ask a friend for prayer, living or departed, but we don’t need their help; we can address our words directly to God.

And while we begin with the words “For all the saints,” this hymn isn’t a prayer for all the saints. We aren’t asking for their prayers; but neither are we offering our prayers for them. It can comfort us to pray for those whom we have loved and lost; it certainly can’t hurt, in any case. But this is not a prayer for them; it’s not a prayer for God to give them something good or save them from something bad.

Instead, it’s a prayer of thanksgiving and wonder. “For all the saints who from their labors rest…thy name, O Jesus be forever blessed.”

The history of the world, and of each one of our lives, has been full of holy people. They were people, still, and therefore imperfect. But they were, and they are, holy people, people who have inspired us to be the best, most loving versions of ourselves. Some of them are famous. Some of them are completely unknown. But all of them have left their mark on our lives.

Sometimes we might ask them for their prayers, and be comforted by the reminder that we share some mysterious, ongoing relationship with our ancestors and departed friends. Sometimes we might pray for them, putting words to our yearning for them to be at peace. And this day—on All Saints’ Day—we can simply offer thanks to God that they lived, and bless God for creating a world that has such people in it.

There is much that could be said about the consecration of our new bishop on Saturday, but one image in particular stuck out to me from that day.

The cover art on the (forty-six page!) bulletin for the service was taken from a mosaic in Aachen Cathedral, in Germany. The mosaic depicts “The Pelican in her Pietry,” a classic medieval image of Christ. Medieval scholars believed (for whatever reason) that pelicans “nurse” their young by piercing their breasts to feed them with their own blood, a symbol that seemed to evoke both Christ’s sacrificial self-offering on the Cross and his continual self-offering in the Eucharist.

It is an image of Christ, as the program for the consecration notes, that is “both eucharistic and maternal in nature.”

It was an image that I was thinking about as I read through the bulletin while waiting for the service to begin. I happened to be sitting next to a dear friend, a priest with two young children even smaller than mine, someone with whom I’ve shared much of the complicated and sometimes-difficult experiences of parenthood and parish ministry alike. For both of us, having a bishop who is the mother of three teenagers and young adults was meaningful.

I was moved by the way in which this image of the pelican is a beautiful and complicated one: a depiction of the ways in which we offer ourselves to feed the people we love, and are fed by God’s own self-offering in turn.

But I was especially struck by a momentary glimpse, when Bishop Julia, after being vested, happened to turn—and we could see this image on her back.

What an image to choose, as the new leader of our portion of the church. It’s something I’ll be sitting with for a while. What does it mean to feed the people of our diocese from your own blood? What does it mean to be fed? What does it mean to carry this on your back, at every visitation, ordination, confirmation—at every sacramental event at which you serve during your time as bishop? How is this a comforting reminder of the maternal nature of a bishop’s ministry? And isn’t it kind of a troubling one?

I hope you’ll join your prayers with mine for Bishop Julia as her ministry officially begins. Bishop Alan has handed over the crozier; his time of shepherding our diocese is over, and Bishop Julia’s has begun! May Alan’s retirement offer him time for refreshment and rest, and may the Holy Spirit guide Bishop Julia in the weeks and months ahead!